This annual Group Relations residential conference, which has been running since 1957, is designed for those who are looking to develop their leadership and managerial capacity to effect change in work groups and organisations and to improve their ability to work with complex and challenging issues.

The Leicester conference provides unique and exciting opportunities for you to learn through experience about group, organisation’s and social dynamics and the exercise of authority and power. How to get the most out of your team, generating goodwill and employee ‘buy-in’ – followership – and understanding and working with your own and your organisation’s resistance to change.
There is now wide recognition that group and systems psychodynamics play a vital part in the success or failure of work projects and organisational change. Likewise, the understanding and management of feelings, tensions and other dynamics in group situations are essential to effective leadership.

Each conference is a temporary organisation consisting of a series of events which are designed to enable the exploration of different work experiences and behaviour. So, there are no presenters as such; instead the conference staff offer working hypotheses based on their experiences and understanding of what is happening in the ‘here and now’ during the various events.

The next Leicester conference invites you to find out about the different boundaries with which we engage in our daily professional encounters, including the boundary relationship between mind and body, yourself and your colleagues, colleagues and the environment, the creative potential within these relationships and your capacity to transform organisational life into a meaningful experience of citizenship in this world.

Group Relations conferences are educational events which are based on learning through experience – the design for these has been developed by pioneers from the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR) for over 60 years.

We believe that strategic and structural dynamics of organisations can be studied and understood and the knowledge acquired and applied by working through the conscious and unconscious dynamics of leadership and management in organisations. We believe that our conference promotes the integration of intellectual capacity and emotional intelligence so producing leaders who have creative visionary potential, enabling them to work more effectively at helping their employees and themselves to adapt to and take on future roles.

Alumni of the Leicester Conference have said

“ In our two weeks of intense proximity, I saw patterns of interactions playing out that echoed with what I have seen happen over weeks and months in the working world.”
Andrew Jones, Executive Coach, Accadence, Singapore

“ For me, [the conference] surfaced some very profound identity-related issues that impact the way that I engage my work roles... As a ‘professional educator’ I will mull over the role and treatment of ‘fun’ in learning for the rest of my life.”
Dr Leighton Jay, Human Services Consultant, Sotica, Australia

“ I found the conference a very powerful experience that has affected me both at home and at work. At work it has led me to being much more aware and vigilant in picking up on things I do and what is happening around me and of my role in groups.“
Dr Angela Devon, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, NHS, UK

“ I am living in the impact of the Leicester conference on daily basis, yet it has immersed into me, and become more subtle and deeper part of me, to such a degree... I joined a CEO program in Shanghai with CEIBs business school as the coach/facilitator there...”
Qi Zhang, Owner, Bridge & Enrich, The Netherlands

Any change agent who wishes to better understand how their organisation functions, how they can deepen their understanding of what makes effective and sustainable change and how a local initiative impacts and is impacted by the broader context.

Participants come from all sectors, levels, career stages and backgrounds and from all over the world - up to 2/3 of participants are non-UK based.

Staff are informed by their own experiences of the events and work to the primary task of the event and the conference overall. They will offer working hypotheses based on their understanding of what is happening. Conference staff are not observers of the process but are actively involved in it.

They will be examining, interpreting, reflecting and making sense of their own as well as of members’ experiences, including those which are hidden and sometimes unconscious. Conference staff will be as explicit as possible about their task and roles throughout the conference. The ways in which they take up their roles are always open to examination. They work together as collective management to hold and maintain the boundaries of the conference institution.